Joseph Fiennes plays a blinder in Dear England

Hat-tip to Joseph Fiennes: his transformation into the former England manager Gareth Southgate is a triumph. James Graham (Sherwood, Quiz) has adapted his own Olivier award-winning 2023 play about Southgate’s stewardship of the national team – the soaring ups and plummeting downs – into a four-part BBC One drama, Dear England, co-directed by Paul Whittington and Rupert Goold.

Fiennes reprises his National Theatre role as Southgate, with striking physical resemblance and a monotonal “quiet man” energy. He captures the diffidence and decency Southgate brought to bear on the England team and perhaps even on the nation’s psyche, as well as the coach’s faintly haunted air: the former centre-back’s infamously fluffed penalty sent the international squad out of Euro 96. 

An early scene with Bobby Schofield as departing striker Wayne Rooney (who talks about “the lads” not wanting to play for England) shows what Southgate was up against when he took over in 2016. The coach insists on doing things his way: a “warm and fuzzy” team-spirit approach enabled by a psychologist, played by Jodie Whittaker.

Southgate brings in young players and dislodges the psychic albatross of the 1966 World Cup win. He tells the story of his own penalty disaster as a campfire horror (“I began that walk … that long walk to the spot”) and makes the team practise to the point that they start winning penalty shootouts for the first time. The squad make it to finals (Euro 2020); the nation is ecstatic; everything is wonderful – until it isn’t. In 2024, Southgate stood down after a series of defeats, exits and mishaps – including penalty shootouts.

The cast put in a great shift, including the many younger actors playing the footballers: Harry Kane (Will Antenbring), Marcus Rashford (Edem-Ita Duke) and Bukayo Saka (Abdul Sessay). But Graham is heavy-handed with the state-of-the-nation contextualising, weaving in Brexit, Covid, the queen’s death and more (too much more). Southgate’s own 1996 penalty grief is overplayed; it wafts through the action like a Shakespearean ghost. The penalties are also the moments the drama most exhibits its stage origins, with the players plunged into theatrical darkness. At four hours, the production is overlong, resulting in maudlin repetition.

That said, there’s something ambitious and interesting about this adaptation. Fiennes’s performance, for one thing, is a masterclass of restraint. And the script confronts head-on the ugly moments, such as the vicious racism suffered by team members after the side lost on penalties in the Euro 2020 final.

Dear England also shows a rich understanding of the game. How for fans, football is a displacement of collective emotion and for players, the pressure leads to paralysing fear. And how for men such as Southgate, nothing that happens on the pitch – even missed spot kicks – comes close to the dread and pain of dealing with their own retirement from the game. This isn’t a perfect production, but it takes chances.

On Netflix, Zach Heinzerling’s docuseries Rafa, profiling the Spanish tennis superstar Rafael Nadal, also deals with the agony of sporting endings. Dubbed for English-speaking viewers, it tells the player’s story over two main timelines. The first traces his ascent from his start in Mallorca through the ranks of international tennis; with 22 grand slam titles, he’s beaten on the men’s circuit only by Novak Djokovic, and has won more French Open titles (14) than any other competitor.

The second timeline shows Nadal injury-racked in his late 30s and struggling to compete at the highest level in his final 2024 season. This thread is raw and difficult to watch. It outlines how his attributes – grit, passion, resilience – blinded him to the one truth he couldn’t handle: that it was time to quit.

It’s a relief to see Nadal, a happy husband and father, play with his young son, Rafael Jr (there is now a second child, Miquel). As can be the way with hyper-focused sports competitors, he generally exudes all the human charm of a concrete wall, but he comes alive when discussing why this shot worked, or another didn’t. This, after all, is Nadal’s reputation: driven, analytical, self-flagellating. The point is stressed by his suffering from Müller-Weiss syndrome, a foot condition that means he’s played for most of his career in pain, with an insole in his shoe causing further problems, and anti-inflammatory medication perforating his intestines.  

Members of Nadal’s close-knit family are interviewed, including his uncle and former trainer, Toni, who pushed him to greatness and, although he doesn’t say so, still seems peeved about being sidelined when his nephew hired former world No 1 Carlos Moyá (who also speaks here).

Other interviewees include a chilly, disengaged Roger Federer (is it my imagination or does he damn Nadal with faint praise?). Elsewhere, Djokovic and John McEnroe are warmer presences, but by the end of the four episodes, your sole focus is on a somewhat lost, disoriented Nadal. It’s strangely touching how he doesn’t expend a single bit of energy pretending it doesn’t hurt.

Make That Movie is the new six-part Channel 4 sitcom from Sam Campbell, the surrealist Australian standup (Taskmaster, Last One Laughing) who won best show at the 2022 Edinburgh comedy awards. It’s directed by Joe Pelling, who made the cult puppet series Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared.

The new sitcom has a madcap premise; in each episode, he and his incompetent, purple-clad team produce the film idea of an ordinary person. The first concept concerns a man and a woman who can turn into snakes – but only one at a time.

It proceeds from there. There’s lampooning of creative pretension (“Get off my goddamn set!”), a sprinkling of special guests, and some off-the-wall one-liners: “Don’t bite my head off – I’m not the gingerbread man!”. Please prepare yourself psychologically and emotionally, too, for a character called “Super Breast”.

Make That Movie, which also stars Aaron Chen, Lara Ricote, Helen Bauer and David Hargreaves, is definitely for the Campbell hardcore and can be patchy. It’s also different, pointlessly rude and winningly silly. If surreal humour tinged with existential despair is your thing, check it out.

Photograph by Netflix/Left Bank/BBC, Laura Palmer/Channel 4